Welcome to Sodor
by Traitor of All Traitors
Summary: It's never been attempted or thought of, but suppose that Shinji's dimensional displacement by the Twelfth Angel stranded him in a place where certain vehicles have personalities, and he befriended one that is from a similar place as him?


Creation began on 11-06-15

Creation ended on 11-07-15

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Welcome to Sodor

A/N: I looked through the crossover categories, and this will be the first, new crossover that anyone's ever done before.

The last thing he ever saw before the power in the plug went out was a big flash of light. He thought he'd go blind if it were any brighter, but then he lost consciousness. As he came to, he realized that he was no longer inside Unit-01, but outside it on an open field of grass and flowers. The sunlight shining over the place.

"Where am I?" Shinji wondered, getting up and standing on his feet.

He looked around where he stood, but Unit-01 was nowhere to be found. Another look at some nearby trees revealed brownish-red leaves, indicating that wherever Shinji was, it wasn't affected by a summer season as far as he knew. Soon enough, he started to move away from where he was, hoping to find someone that could give him some answers…and some food, as he hadn't eaten in over ten hours since his last meal.

Rrrrrrrr! He heard something from close by, and it sounded like something he hadn't heard before in a long time since his arrival to Tokyo-3.

And then, he saw what had to have made the noise. It was a train. A blue one, pulling some cars behind it, and it looked as though it was being assisted by a green train behind the cars.

"Hey!" Shinji called out to them, running over to where the tracks they were using were. "Wait! Stop!"

He must've gotten their attention, because they came to a halt as he caught up to them.

Two men came out of the two trains and stood in front of him.

"Are you alright?" One of them that operated the blue train asked him.

"Un-uh," Shinji responded. "I'm lost, hungry, and I don't really know where I am. Can you help me?"

"Of course," one of them from the green train offered, and ran back to the green train and returned with a lunchbox. "You're on Sodor."

"Sodor?"

"It's an island located between the Isle of Man and England," the other man from the blue train explained to him.

 _I'm somewhere in the Irish Sea?_ Shinji thought, remembering some of the maps from his geography class, but never seeing an island called Sodor.

As he ate a sandwich and drank some orange juice, Shinji felt better now that he had eaten something.

Hee-hee! He heard one of the trains, and it confused him.

"Um, I'm sorry, but how many of you operate the trains?" He asked the four men.

"It's just us four," the second man from the green train answered him.

"But then who was that just blew the whistle?"

"Oh, that was Percy."

"Who's Percy?"

"The green train."

Shinji looked at the green train and found it impossible for it to blow its own whistle. But then, he saw it blow again.

"But that's impossible," he gasped.

"Hardly anything's impossible on the Island of Sodor," one of the men from the blue train expressed.

-x-

Shinji found it hard to believe, but once he got a closer look at the blue and green trains, which he later found out were Thomas and Percy, respectively, he thought he was dreaming. He had never seen a train with a face on its front. And then, there was the ride on the trains back to this place called Tidmouth, which is where most of the trains of their main line resided when not on the job. He never thought that there were so many trains on an island like this before, and in so many styles, both unique and similar to the ones he'd already seen.

"Incredible," he sighed, as all the trains present at the station had faces on them.

"You're a strange fellow that just found himself on Sodor," one of Thomas' drivers, Bob, expressed about Shinji.

Shinji looked down at his plugsuit, and realized that it did make him stand out too much.

"It's complicated," he muttered.

"There's something about the way you talk, too," Bob told him. "It's similar to the way Hiro speaks."

"Hiro?"

"He's the engine that Thomas found about a year ago in a siding. He currently helps along the express line. He's the Master of the Railway."

That's when Shinji recalled reading a book on trains from the early Twentieth Century…and how some were made in Japan between Nineteen-Thirty-Six and Nineteen-Fifty-One.

"Hiro is…a Japanese engine?" He asked him.

"Yes."

"Then I should meet him."

"You might want to wear something different from that diving suit of yours first."

-x-

Unit-01 was a complete wreck in the destruction of the Twelfth Angel. Absolutely nothing of it could be salvaged. The Entry Plug was heavily damaged, but there were no human remains to be found. This was likely due to the multiple detonations of the Non-Nuclear bombs that were absorbed into the shadow-like body of the Angel, obliterating the Third Child to nothing.

Misato was devastated. Not even a petty vengeance against the Angels was worth the death of any of the pilots of the Evas. This was crossing a grave line, one that couldn't be uncrossed, no matter what you tried to atone. But Shinji was gone, and there was no getting him back.

-x-

They were hand-me-downs at best, but they fit Shinji quite nicely, and they were similar to the clothes he had back where he was from (he had come to consider that Sodor was not just an island that shouldn't have existed anywhere on the planet, but he was in an entirely different world). In addition to the pants and shirt, Bob gave him a jacket. This made Shinji almost seem to fit in with the people of Sodor, excluding his foreign appearance. But nobody could change a person's nationality or ethnicity, so all Shinji could do was try his best to fit in.

Walking around Knapford Station where Hiro was to show up, Shinji still found it hard to believe that he was in a place where the trains had faces…and were capable of speech and communication like ordinary people were.

HRRRR! He heard a loud whistle go off, and saw a large, black train approaching the station.

It stopped right beside him and released steam from its sides.

"Oh!" Shinji gasped; this was the third time this happened with him near a train. _First, it was the one they call James, and then the one they call Emily. Will it ever end?_

As the steam dissipated, a voice spoke up, similar to Shinji's.

"I'm sorry about that, young man," it, no, he said to him. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, sir," he responded to…the train. "Um… Are you the one called Hiro?"

"I am. I was told that a stranger on Sodor might have been here."

"My name is Shinji. Shinji Ikari."

"Hiro. Master of the Rail."

"It's nice to meet you, Master of the Rail."

-x-

It had been only two weeks, but Shinji and Hiro had been inseparable since their first meeting. After learning and exploring more of the island, Shinji found it completely different from where he came from, and not just because of the seasons. With no hope in getting home, he asked the man in charge of the trains, Sir Topham Hatt, if it were possible for him to work with the trains. Hiro, in particular, since they had the same language.

Sir Topham Hatt, who was initially going to turn the boy's request down, decided to let him work with the trains. There had been something about Shinji's eyes, a sort of pain that wouldn't be mended if he'd been sent anywhere else in the world. For some reason, he wasn't sure how, but Sir Topham Hatt suspected that Shinji had no home to go back to.

Shinji found this to be a quiet way to live, even if he was around something that made a lot of noise much of the time. Nothing but the rails, the surrounding, beautiful scenery and the engines that road through them every day. It was a quiet and busy day, with just Hiro, his drivers and himself working the express line. Shinji stuck his head out into the air on Hiro's right side and felt the wind rush through his hair and on his face. It felt good.

"Is it like this all the time?" He asked Hiro's primary driver.

"More or less, Mr. Ikari," he answered him.

"Please, call me Shinji. There's no need for the formality."

-x-

Misato's apartment was an unsteady wreck. With the loss of Shinji, it fell into disarray. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the refrigerator was half-empty with only the food left in it being near its expiration date, and layers of dust covered everything. Even Pen-Pen's food bowl was empty.

Asuka and Misato weren't there right now, but had anyone gone into Shinji's room, they would've found, on his bed, a small train that looked like an exact replica of an old engine from the early Twentieth Century.

To be continued…

A/N: The first crossover _Evangelion_ and _Thomas_. What do you think of it?


End file.
